On an email list I belong to, Janice Gelb talks about a quote she got from a friend of hers, Moshe Yudkowsky:

I’ve run across a quote that absolutely amazes and delights me. During the heyday of Athenian democracy, the citizens could vote on an annual basis to expel, for a period of ten years, a single individual who they believed would best serve the city by a prolonged absence. The name of the individual was written on an ostraka, a shard of pottery, and cast as a ballot.

And thus do we get the concept and word ostracize.

Moshe continues:

Megacles managed to attain the distinction of being ostracized not once, but twice; the first time in 467 BCE and the second time at some unknown later date. We know of this from records and from ostraka that were recovered from Athens. In 1994 we saw the first publication of one of these ancient ballots:

For Megacles, son of Hippocrates and his horse as well…

In other words, Megacles and the horse he rode in on. Two thousand five hundred years later, and some curses have never changed.

Hi, guys! I just got in from the Ortho doc. It was a good news and semi-sucky news kind of appointment.

They cut off my cast with the chainsaw. This was great, as the novelty of it all has worn extremely thin by now. There was no huge black semi-sentient fungus covering my lower leg, as I’d anticipated. Just looked like a pale, wrinkly old-man leg, with my foot still distressingly swollen. Doc says that will go down soon.

That place where most people have calf-muscle, I now have a jello-filled sack of skin. Ick. Ick. Ick.

Actually, there may be some muscle still in there. But it’s going to need a lot of encouragement to get it out in public again.

They took a bunch of bone-pics. The doc looked at them and said I can keep my cast off. The breaks have healed in proper alignment.

Which was the double-plus good part of the appointment.

The semi-sucky part — I don’t get to put any weight on the leg, as the healed bone is fragile still. Will have to live in the wheel-chairs and on crutches, for probably another month. And worse, there’s then another month of muscle rehab before I can safely ride my scooter again. Grunt.

In case I haven’t made it clear yet — Don’t break a leg, kids.

But now I can finally see my leg, and start stretching those ankle muscles out again, because they’ve contracted to where there is almost no range of motion.

I’m gonna get it all back, though, the flex and the strength, and the road bike, before summer is over, if I have my way.

Wait! I just realized — I can take a bath now! Like a real boy! For the last month and a half, it’s been the occasional sponge-wipe, and once every ten days or so, I cautiously crab into the tub with an over-turned wastebasket, and prop my leg up while I very uncomfortably wash off.

Tonight, I get to soak for hours, read a book, maybe take a nap or two. I won’t smell bad when I go to bed tonight. I’ll be clean for the first time since February 4, 2007.

You can’t see it, but I’m doing the one-legged Happy Dance now.

:

Addendum:  In my moments of narcissistic joy, I forgot to mention this — I’m extremely grateful to Martha for taking me to my appointment and patiently waiting for me to finish up, then chauffering me to get the celebratory ice cream. Without her and Megan, I wouldn’t have made it so far through this episode in my life.

Younger Girl is, among other things, on a synchronized skating team, one of three run from the local skating rink. I was watching her yesterday; she had her regular lesson at 3:30, and team practice at 5:25 (with recreational/ practice skating in between). She started skating in December of 05; she broke her wrist three weeks in and was benched for a month. So she’s had roughly 15 months of skating experience, during which she has moved up from pre-Alpha (the beginner class) to Delta, and the synch team. Mostly when she goes to the rink I read, or talk to other parents. But yesterday I really watched her.

It’s kind of awe-inspiring. She’s not the kind of kid who took ballet and played princess and is naturally full of gestural grace. When she took dance lessons they were hip-hop. She prefers romantic comedy movies and books about being in middle school to tea parties and dress-up. But when I watch her on the ice, YG has a kind of effortlessness of line and gesture. I watch her skate up to some of her team mates, do a 180 turn to stop, throwing her arms around their shoulders. Or chattering excitedly while skating backward (backward! yikes!) with another girl. She’s still a neo–her shoot-the-duck is wobbly, and her spins can be erratic; she loves to skate, but doesn’t seem interested in doing solo figure skating competition. But sync skating, with its social aspect, allows her to be skate competitively without getting too girly about it.

To skate well is to acquire a series of skills; in the earlier classes there are kids on skates so tiny that they use walkers on the ice to keep themselves upright. But I also see kids not much older who are landing doubles and salchows (okay, not with the height and verve of Sacha Cohen, but even so). And for a lot of kids, including my own, the time between staggering on ice and soaring around with no apparent effort is really brief. How long did it take YG to get onto her feet and walk? How long before she could run reliably? And now her muscles know how to move her on the ice, not only how to turn her around or stop her, but how to do it gracefully.

So I sit in the “parents’ room” (which is marginally warmer than sitting out on the benches with hoi polloi) and watch my hip hop girl soaring, giving in to the g-force of line turns remembering to turn her head at the same moment the girls on either side of her do. She’s still working on graceful hands, though. Graceful hands, those princessy ballet hands, aren’t yet in her physical vocabulary. They’ll come. If she can shoot-the-duck, she can acquire graceful hands.